Thanks Rupert and others. Some interesting ideas.
One has to remember that the central concept of BR is that Frank built the game around only crits. The other minor hits from BL are stripped out. So missiles only doing 1d6 hits of strength 2 damage would be useless against all but the smallest vessels. Hence Frank went with 1-6 strength damage per missile in order to have missiles doing damage against all vessels (but as I say, when combined with the significant difficulty in spotting and hitting missiles, this can be a gamebreaker).
There is no sign of the rule about auto-spotting missiles launched from a previously locked-up adversary. But I like this tweak. However, in BR you are free to launch missiles long before you are locked-up and have them coast ahead of you in space, so a canny ship captain would do this so that he could claim that his missiles were already away before he was locked-up.
I have Merrick's suggested errata. Unfortunately, his observation about the difference if Diff Lvls between BL and BR works in the opposite direction! He argues that the Diff Lvls in BR should be shifted one level *more* difficult to match those in BL. This would make spotting and hitting missiles EVEN MORE problematic.
One has to remember that the central concept of BR is that Frank built the game around only crits. The other minor hits from BL are stripped out. So missiles only doing 1d6 hits of strength 2 damage would be useless against all but the smallest vessels. Hence Frank went with 1-6 strength damage per missile in order to have missiles doing damage against all vessels (but as I say, when combined with the significant difficulty in spotting and hitting missiles, this can be a gamebreaker).
There is no sign of the rule about auto-spotting missiles launched from a previously locked-up adversary. But I like this tweak. However, in BR you are free to launch missiles long before you are locked-up and have them coast ahead of you in space, so a canny ship captain would do this so that he could claim that his missiles were already away before he was locked-up.
I have Merrick's suggested errata. Unfortunately, his observation about the difference if Diff Lvls between BL and BR works in the opposite direction! He argues that the Diff Lvls in BR should be shifted one level *more* difficult to match those in BL. This would make spotting and hitting missiles EVEN MORE problematic.